Wine with the Childhood Sweetheart, Whose World Is This?

The Sheng dynasty has a “good-for-nothing” prince who loves to play the fool, while the Yu dynasty has a “serious-minded” young scholar who excels at his studies.

One has a childhood sweetheart who’s a business prodigy and always knows how to turn a scam into a profit. The other has a naturally dark-minded physician friend who saves lives, then twists the knife with a cutting remark.

When they were four, the two northern and southern kingdoms briefly made peace. Four little kids crossed paths in a corner of the imperial palace and raised a ruckus.

Xiao Che stole Wei Zheng’s book to sit on, while Lin Zhiwei counted the candies Su Mingyue gave her to work out the price difference. After a fight, they became cross-border frenemies, sharing their secret snack stashes and their long history of pranking one another.

But childhood friendships cannot last forever, and their loyalties lie with different countries.

When they meet again, he is a playboy prince at the Sheng court, pretending to be foolish and passing the blame like a pro, while she is a “merchant” boss who makes a fortune behind the scenes and plants traps along the way.

He is a calculating power player in the Yu bureaucracy, defeating his opponents with logic at every turn, while she is the brilliant physician at his side, healing patients and following up with sharp-tongued barbs.

Rising canal transport fees? A battle over salt and iron? Border skirmishes?

Come on, let’s start with a game of chess and see who wins with the better tricks:

Xiao Che: “I’ll stage an accident to make them pay!”

Wei Zheng: “I’ll write a ten-thousand-word essay to refute him.”

Lin Zhiwei: “Cut off his cash flow!”

Su Mingyue: “Oh, then I’ll… save someone first, and quietly give them a little laxative?”

They never intended to kill one another. But on the chessboard, each was willing to fight for a future for the country they stood behind.